WWALS Watershed Coalition advocates for conservation and stewardship of the Withlacoochee, Willacoochee, Alapaha, Little, and Suwannee River watersheds in south Georgia and north Florida through education, awareness, environmental monitoring, and citizen activities.

Here is most of a year’s river water quality testing data
from the city of Valdosta, on a
Water Reporter map:

Click on any of the colored diamonds for graphs.
Scroll right to see more graphs.
Click on any graph to see every datapoint.
Clearly fecal coliform (FCOLI) and E. coli (ECOLI)
have significant spikes way beyond the Georgia state limit of 200 cfu/100 ml.

Bring: Cleanup materials will be provided, but if
you’ve got a trash picker, bring it along.
No boat required. You can bring a boat if you like, but unless it
rains before then, there will be very little water in the
river.

WWALS will tour Valdosta’s
Wastewater Treatment Plants (WTPs).
Thanks to Scott Fowler and Director Darryl Muse for the longstanding invitation.
WWALS invites you to come, from both Georgia and Florida,
especially people downstream on the Withlacoochee, Alapaha,
or Suwannee Rivers.

Where:
We will go to the
Withlacoochee WTP
next to the Withlacoochee River,
and the
Mud Creek WTP
on Knights Creek, upstream from Mud Creek, the Alapahoochee River,
and the Alapaha River.
We may go to other points such as force mains or lift stations.
If we have time we will also tour Valdosta’s drinking water treatment plant.

Duration:
Probably several hours, but should be done by noon.

Free:
There is no charge.
This tour is primarily for WWALS members, but we won’t turn away
anybody else and I doubt Valdosta will, either.
We do recommend you
join WWALS today.

This is not a regular WWALS outing or event, but for
more
WWALS outings and events as they are posted, see the WWALS calendar or
the
WWALS outings and events web page.
WWALS members also get an upcoming list in the Tannin Times newsletter.

Water quality is an issue in the Florida Senate race,
allowing critics of the candidates’ proposals to raise real solutions.

One candidate:

In August, [Florida Senator Bill] Nelson
co-introduced legislation with U.S. Sen. Marco
Rubio, R-Fla., that would direct the federal Interagency Task Force
on Harmful Algal Blooms to study the causes and consequences of
algae in Lake Okeechobee and around Florida’s south and southwestern
coasts.

Even California’s water quality law, the Porter-Cologne Act,
recognizes the challenge. A 2004 addendum about nonpoint source
pollution put it this way: “Current land use management
practices that have resulted in nonpoint source pollution have a
long and complicated physical, economic and political history…
Therefore, it is expected that it will take a significant amount of
time for the [regional water boards] to approve or endorse nonpoint
source control implementation programs.”

Here is (at least some of) the water quality testing data Valdosta was required to collect after its major spills of June in the Withlacoochee River
basin and August in the Alapaha River basin.
Maybe Valdosta is right that neither of these spills got into waterways,
but something sure did, according to this data.
Curiously, in both cases the worst fecal coliform readings were upstream
from the spill location.

There’s only one datapoint (the yellow dot) on that graph below the Georgia safe limit for fecal coliform of 200 colony forming units per 100 milliliters of water (cfu/100 ml).
You’d think it would be better upstream, right?
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